Virtual Internship Reimagined: My Experience

2,990 miles. That is the distance between Boston, MA, and Newport Beach, CA. I did not expect to have that distance when I accepted my internship with Cloud9 Advisory. 1,078 miles. That is the distance between Boston, MA, and Atlanta, GA. I also did not expect to have the opportunity to work remotely from different cities in the country. Instead, I expected to be living in Boston, MA, and sitting at a desk only 20 feet from my coworkers. I expected to be able to turn around a spinning chair to ask a question across the office. And I expected in-office creative collaboration, brainstorms, and office lunches. So go with the best-laid plans.

2020 was the year of the unexpected for everyone. On March 13, 2020, right when I was gearing up to pack my bags at the end of school and head across the country for the summer, the whole country shut down, as COVID-19 rapidly spread. Everyone was greatly impacted by the change that COVID-19 brought. For me, it meant rethinking my summer plans and discussing a way to design a virtual learning experience. I was lucky. Truly lucky. From the outset, Cloud9 Advisory was ready to buckle up, improvise and adapt, and adjust quickly to the new virtual world we all had to operate in. Before I could even process what was going on in the world, I had a collaborative spreadsheet with tasks and a task tracker in my inbox; biweekly touchpoints were already on my calendar. Seeing this smoothly unfold in a blink of an eye was the moment I realized that a valuable virtual internship was more than possible. It just takes the right technology and employees willing to adjust and move forward – both of which Cloud9 Advisory has.

GoogleWorkspace was the glue between Cloud9 Advisory and me. It provided a space for us to collaborate with coworkers on all platforms and demonstrated that a company can fully onboard and train new employees and interns virtually. The “game changers” were GoogleMeet, GoogleCalendar, GoogleSheets/Docs/Slides, and GoogleDrive.

GoogleMeet immediately brought “office chatter” back to life, as it gave a “face to face” feel and that human touch you get from interacting with others. I always looked forward to hearing what the temperature of my boss’s attic was and seeing what his daughter drew that week. My GoogleMeet touchpoints were as close to the office as I could get and, more times than not, it felt as though everyone was sitting in the same room.

GoogleMeet also became a space for creative collaboration. During our touchpoints, we would bounce ideas off of one another and continually dig deeper until we struck gold and our creative light bulbs went off. Screensharing on GoogleMeet was another particular saving grace feature for me during my internship, as whenever I had a question on something or wanted to share an update, I was able to share my screen, allowing us to all be on the same page.

GoogleMeet touchpoints would not have been possible without GoogleCalendar. The magic of GoogleCalendar is being able to see everyone’s schedule. This made scheduling easy. Whenever I wanted to set up a touchpoint, I didn’t need to send 5 emails back and forth with my boss to pencil something in on the calendar. I would simply pull up GoogleCalendar, look at when he was free, and schedule a meeting with a GoogleMeet link directly in the invite.

GoogleSheets/Docs/Slides helped me create different digital assets that included strong visualization, written findings/ideas, and curated aesthetic presentations. Each of these platforms allows users to add comments, assign tasks to coworkers, or edit directly. This helped all of us easily collaborate on documents. When I was finished working on a task, I would share the link with my coworkers and they were able to add comments and directly edit. This sped up the editing process and helped all of us stay organized, as each “read through” wasn’t on a different document draft.

GoogleDrive was the “Gorilla Glue” that held everything together. It provided me with a place to not only organize all of the assets I created on the different Google platforms, but it also helped me set up the future Cloud9 marketing team for success. Even after the end of my virtual internship, the marketing assets that I created throughout the summer are still used and referenced today. This ensured that Cloud9 Advisory would continue to move in an uphill direction, rather than continually go in circles as people came and left the marketing team. As the company continues to grow, more people can be added to the drive to continue to build on what was started.

My experience virtually interning with Cloud9 Advisory blew my expectations out of the water. I learned and grew a great amount and I am so thankful for my experience and to Cloud9 Advisory for taking advantage of an opportunity that required extra creativity.

Cloud9 Advisory is a Google Partner and their employees know Google better than anyone else. In fact, everyone internally swears by GoogleWorkspace. Cloud9 Advisory knows the nits and grits of how to use GoogleWorkspace to best optimize a company’s potential and create a collaborative space to work. GoogleWorkspace made my virtual internship a seamless one, and Cloud9 can help your business collaborate just as seamlessly with GoogleWorkspace.

If you are looking to collaborate stronger with your team and company, especially in this virtual world, then GoogleWorkspace and all the platforms integrated into GoogleWorkspace are perfect for you and we would love to help you get set up. We live by GoogleWorkspace at Cloud9 Advisory and I can honestly say that my experience would not have been possible without it. Get your company going in an upward and positive direction and start seamlessly collaborating! Contact us today to get set up with GoogleWorkspace.